Overcome fear and get the visibility your business needs to grow

Andrea Kaldy is a visibility guide who believes that everyone has the right to take up as much space as they need while sharing their wisdom with the world. She works with women to guide them on their path to discover their visibility triggers and false beliefs about their right to be seen and heard.

Andrea is a priestess and torchbearer for those who want to break out of their bounds and claim their rightful place in the world with their work. And, she is dedicated to lighting the path ahead and reacquainting today’s women with their power.

I interviewed Andrea as part of the Spotlight Series because what’s a better way to grow your business than overcoming the fear of visibility and being the guiding light for your community?!

This is a must-read for all online business owners – new and old – who struggle with visibility in business.

Q. Everyone raves about how “visibility” and “getting visible” is a must in business these days – why is that?

Andrea: People think that visibility is all about being seen everywhere. There is a misconception that the more content you churn out, the more you will be seen. The truth is, there is more content out there and being continuously produced than what we actually consume. That means that some content will never be seen, heard, read, watched.

Sure, keywords and hashtags and all that stuff are great to have. They give you the opportunity to be seen by people. But, it’s another thing for people to want to be in your community. And that is what visibility is all about.

Visibility is about being the torchbearer. There is an element of leadership in it. It’s about being the person who isn’t afraid to be the first one on the path.

Visibility is not just taking up people’s time so you can show them what you have to sell. It’s for those who have the guts to go say, I will go there before, light your way so that you may step on the same path with more ease.

Q. Is visibility necessary to grow a business?

Andrea: There are no two ways about it. You wouldn’t open a brick and mortar business, before the days of the internet, and go out of your way not to get people into your shop. So yes visibility in business is necessary.

It’s not about quantity though. It’s about quality.

The only people that will grow your business are the ones buying from you, engaging you, invested in you in one way or another. You want to be visible to the people who will do that.

A butcher shop wouldn’t go out of their way to be visible for vegetarians. Because that wouldn’t grow their business.

Of course, it’s up to you how fast and in what direction you want to grow your business. If you’re happy with the occasional client and buyer that comes along every few weeks that stumbles upon your business, go for it.

If you have a desire to establish a business that supports a lifestyle, you have to be seen by the people who are ready and willing to buy your stuff.

Q. Why do people fear visibility?

Andrea: There is no one size fits all. We ALL have issues with visibility in business and personally.

The challenge is to get people to see that it’s not all those excuses they use to keep themselves small and invisible that they need to work on. It’s those beliefs and triggers that keep us confined to a small space because that’s all we think we deserve.

There is an element of vulnerability that people associate with being seen. We all fear having to carry guilt and shame for something we have supposedly done wrong. And in the online space, it’s just as easy to tear someone down publicly as it is to build someone up.

When you find what visibility story is your kryptonite, you can start working with it to your advantage.

Q. What are the 4 underlying stories people have for avoiding visibility?

Andrea:

1. The first story we tell ourselves is that we are defective.

If this story rings true for you, you often feel you are “just born that way” and so don’t deserve to be seen and heard. This is the strongest story for most people.

We believe that no matter what we do, someone can do it better and so they deserve the visibility, not us.

2. The second story we believe about ourselves is that if we change no-one would accept or love us anymore.

It’s almost as if we would betray our loved ones, our communities, the people that we belong to if we had this strange notion that we aren’t happy with where we are.

That we want to break out of our bounds and no-one would love us, know us, accept us anymore.

3. The third story we keep telling ourselves is that we would put an undue burden on others if we demanded more than our fair share.

Women are amazing at diverting resources away from ourselves, and towards others. We sacrifice for others. We put ourselves last.

With this internal story on board, we often think that if are seen, heard and demand more (which comes with increasing our visibility), that we won’t have as much time, love, attention, etc. to give our loved ones. In fact, we would need more of all that from them to be able to grow with our visibility. This can feel “greedy” or “unfair on others” and lead us to shy away from visibility.

4. The fourth and last story is another typical one. We don’t want to outshine others because we have been taught from a very young age that Showing off was bad.

With this story running rife in your belief system we believe that if we fully owned our power, we will not be liked because we will be seen as egotistical.

Powers around the world, religious and political, have been very cleverly using this little tactic to silence women’s voices. For a long time.

The guilt and shame that is induced when we realise that we outshone someone is a stinker. We end up believing that owning our own power and exerting it can only be bad. Not just for ourselves but the entire world.

Q. What is your process for overcoming/managing fear of visibility?

Andrea: My immediate reaction used to be to hide.

I’m a master of invisibility. So much so that I used to have a lot of trouble with people walking into me in the street, work colleagues not remembering my name, not getting noticed and served at shops, and the like.

It took me a long time, I’m now 44 years old, to even start working on my visibility.

It was a hard slog at the beginning because I was trying to do what everyone else was doing about visibility. Pushing myself to get my face “out there”, and do videos and write blogs and interact with people online and at networking events.

I realised though that I was getting very little for my energetic investment.

I started asking myself why visibility felt so yucky. Like it was dirty.

I took myself to almost zero visibility for a few months to uncover my internal visibility stories. And when I started talking to people about them, I realised they were their stories too.

Managing the fear of visibility is a layered thing.

You discover a story and follow it all the way back to where it came from, and on the way you realise how it affected you in the past. And there you uncover more stories.

It’s like peeling back layers of an onion. Any Shrek fans reading this?

Once you peel back a layer, you get a little more comfortable in your skin because you get an answer to why you were feeling shitty about being seen and heard.

Once you reach a new comfort level, you won’t be there for long! There comes the next wave of visibility challenges.

That’s how you eat an elephant. One layer at a time.

Like I said at the beginning, visibility in business is a complex thing, and triggers and false beliefs about what it means to be seen and heard are just as complex.

The good news is that we all have the same visibility issues. Even those who are super visible right now. They have done the work. They are still doing the work. And they are growing their business at the same time.

Q. what is your message to people struggling with visibility in business?

Andrea: First of all, forgive yourself. Forgive yourself for feeling crippled by the thought of being seen and heard. It’s OK. You’re not defective, you just haven’t found the way that suits you to overcome your visibility challenges.

People talking at you, telling you that you need to be more visible, are not walking in your shoes. You are. Forgive yourself for giving those people space in your head.

Getting in front of a million people who don’t get who and what you are cannot even compare to being seen and heard by even one person who values what you share of yourself.

Visibility is not about your business. It’s about you. If you think of tackling your visibility challenges as only benefiting your business, you’re selling yourself short and you’re not looking at the bigger picture.

Strategic Optimisation + Growth consultant for lean start-ups and change-making entrepreneurs enabling them to grow their business in a sustainable and profitable way. My super-powers are business optimisation, CX, SEO, and leveraging data insights for business growth. #fuelledbycoffee

Strategies and Solutions to develop, optimise and grow your business online utilising automation and integration for maximum efficiency, whilst keeping customer experience the centrepoint of all marketing and operations.